Maybe you ladies are on to something…have been on to something for centuries.

So why didn’t you tell us dudes??

Yeesh.

Well, I forgive you.

Since that fateful day when I took my first steps into the crafting world – steps that would lead me (and Handan) to our new philosophy of Simple Stupid – I’ve grown used to small, quick and easy projects. This Holiday Season, I’ll be sharing a lot more of them with you.

Today, I have two little projects to show you. Each costs next to nothing, with items readily available at the Dollar Store, but they make beautiful and classy Halloween table decorations with just a touch of creep.

Easy DIY Halloween Napkin Rings

Okay, this is about the most ridiculously simple project I’ve ever done. It’s going to take you longer to read about it than it is to actually do it.

You’ll need some cheap vampire teeth, the cheaper, the better. I recommend this party pack from the Dollar Store. A dozen of Dracula’s closest friends were de-fanged to bring you this economy pack of glow-in-the-dark neck-pokers.

Open the pack and get ready. But first, you may want to put a pair in your mouth (yeah, I’d wash those first – I doubt the Chinese factory washed them) and then chase your children around the house screaming, “Blah! Blah! I vant to suck your blood! Blah!”

Congratulations! You’ve just quadrupled your Dork Factor in the eyes of your kids! Now leave them alone and let them go back to their surrogate mother – the iPhone.

I folded them over. By the way, this step is far more amusing if you fold, open, fold, open, fold, open, all while shouting “OmNomNomNomNomNom!” Bonus points for chasing your husband or wife around the kitchen while doing it. Unlike children, our significant others generally do not assign us Dork Factor points, so you’ve nothing to fear and very little to lose.

Here’s the backside. Not my backside, madam! Please!

Next I crushed the elbow bends with a pair of pliers.

This is important. If you don’t crush them with pliers, they’ll tend to spring back open, and you’ll lose that whole hey-look-at-these-vampire-teeth-biting-into-my-napkin effect.

Now my vampire fangs were in a much more manageable pose.

You know, this has me thinking. If a pair of pliers can shut Dracula’s mouth, I wonder if they’d work on Handan’s? Hmmmmm…. [I don’t understand men! They keep telling you to “clam it” all the time, and when you finally do clam it, they start peppering you with questions like “are you, ok? did I do something wrong? why are you so silent?” LOL – Handan]

Easy and Cheap Halloween Table Decoration

Peanut butter and jelly (peanut butter and Fluff for us up here in the Northeast!)

Steak and red wine.

These are all classic and beloved pairings that have stood the test of time.

I’d like to introduce another: Vampires and Spiders.

It makes sense, right? Vampires like to hang out in their coffins in dank, moldy basements and so do spiders! It’s so obvious! So what better pairing for our vampire teeth than a big Dollar Store spider web?

How about two Dollar Store spider webs!

Handan just buys stuff like this, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know what she’s going to do with it until the ideas have had some time to knock around her brain. They are meant to hang on the wall, but Handan had a new idea…

First, we pulled the glow-in-the-dark spiders from their webs and set them aside. They’d come back into play later.

Using the same hanging ribbon that came with the webs, I tied the two webs together.

I’ll show you in two pictures how I tied a granny knot. It’s more dramatic that way.

And puuuuuulllll!

And cut!

I placed the webs in the center of the table, and we added some LED candles. To make things a little creepier, we stretched black spider webbing over the candles and stuck a couple of spiders here and there. We had also bought two little candle holders with spider legs and googly eyes at the Dollar Store. We removed the googly eyes, because no one ever said, “Please, darling, come admire my elegant Halloween table decorations. I used googly eyes, don’t you know? Yes. Googly eyes. I bought them at Nieman Marcus for $385. That’s per eye, darling! And I had to pay another $250 to make them google.”

Okay, I’m almost ready to show you our easy and inexpensive DIY Halloween napkin holders and Halloween table decoration.

But first, a word about the place settings. The chargers came from the Dollar Store, so you can probably guess their price. As for the black plates – we bought them at Target for 79 cents a plate! Yes, they are melamine, but so what? How many times are we going to eat on black plates besides around Halloween? 79 cents!! The Dollar Store only wishes they were as cool as Target! Getting the right color napkins was a bit trickier, so we had to splurge for real microfiber napkins at Bed, Bath and Beyond (or, since it’s Halloween – Bloodbath and Beyond). But really, you can use paper napkins. I’m sure no one would lose their head over it.

Or would they?

Let’s see how it turned out…

And the spiders we pulled off the web? I sprayed them black and stuck them on the wall with poster tack.

Comments

I swear Greg, you should have been a shampoo bottle model. Love the pose with the Rust-Oleum spray paint 😀 and your NomNom Vampire napkin rings are pretty darn cool too. Cheers to men making awesome crafts

I could not stop laughing how fun and fabulous this post is. I always love what you and your wife come up with. You take something we uses, and you make it even better, and all so fun. I love your style of tutorial. Sooooo funny! Thanks for making me smile, a lot!

Hi Bren, that is a good idea, and we actually considered it. We tried a wire on its own, but it wouldn’t hold. The other alternative was to hot glue it in place, but we decided against that for two reasons. One, it would add more time and effort to the project, and two, the teeth we used are so flimsy that hot glue would warp them or even melt them. Our technique with the pliers works perfectly, and it’s the quickest and easiest solution. 🙂

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